I recently sold my HP MSS 485 and used the funds to purchase a Synology NAS DS411j.

This one:

http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS411j/index.php

It's a relatively small unit, but it does have four drive bays, an unidentified CPU and what seems to be not a lot of memory. It is more than enough, I've been told, to stream an HD movie while doing maintenance or backups.

I started out with an HP MSS 470 and moved up to the 485 shortly after it was announced.

I didn't know anything about servers when I bought that 470 and I guarantee you I don't know much more about them now.

I was, however, moderately annoyed when HP decided to discontinue the MSS, so I thought I'd retaliate by discontinuing HP.

The Synology's typically come with NO drives installed. I ordered the Synology from Amazon and also order four Seagate Enterprise 2TB drives.

I also downloaded several manuals from Synology's site. They're not bad manuals, even for a server virgin like me. They don't go far enough, but they do walk you through
all the options available. and there is an extensive user forum on the vendor's site. I also called Synology a couple of times on the phone for pre-purchase questions.

Drive installation was easy, no more difficult than putting a drive into a MSS.

Once the four drives were installed, I installed the latest software from Synology, and my iMac (Synology's don't care whether you are using a PC, a Mac or a Linux machine) immediately found the
server. This was a lot different than my experiences with the 470 and 485, which gave me lots of aggravation during their installs, mostly about "not" being able to find the servers.

It took the Synology unit about eight hours to "prep" the four drives and turn them into a volume. I set the machine up with the vendor's custom RAID configuration (any sort of raid setup seems possible), set up a couple of users,
looked through the Windows-like interface, and established a folder to store my iMac Time Machine backups. That's happening right now. There are a plethora of "apps" that came with the device. I'm only reading about them now.

I'll update this from time to time if there is any interest. Oh...I am most definitely not the person to ask for answers to technical questions.

Excellent, thanks for sharing.

Do you know what type of RAID you are currently using with the Synology? Also, do you know if you are limited to a certain drive size, or can you mix and match drive sizes?

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I'm using what Synology calls SHR or shared hybrid raid. I can supposedly swap out a drive if it goes bad and not lose data. I chose one, rather than two, drives for that. While I backup to the server, my depend upon backup is to an external hard drive via Time Machine.

One can mix and match drive sizes. With SHR, you don't have the usual RAID penalty of being limited to the smallest drive in the array.

I just transferred my iMusic folder to the Synology.

The Time Machine backup I mentioned in the first post completed properly.

I'm sure I'll run into my usual "ignorant of servers" roadblocks, but so far I've had less angst setting this one up than I did with my two HP MSS units. Everything I've tried to set up worked just as described in the manual.

Can you please post something about it's read/write performance compared to your HP MSS? As I'm looking for a replacement for my HP MSS and DS411j seems to be a very good replacement.

I haven't done any speed tests yet, but I have noticed that my SuperDuper! backup of my iMac takes about the same time on the DS411j as it did on my MSS. A straight upload from my iMac to the server of a one gigabyte movie in *.avi format runs at about 30 Mb/S, I think.

Initial setup on the Synology was pretty simple and straightforward. I've only begun to mess around with its media serving abilities. These seem a tad less sophisticated than those on the MSS, but keep in mind my knowledge of servers iapproaches zero.

Tech support is good. I've called Synology a few times and got help without going through a mess of call center b.s.

Installation of the four drives into the Synology was straightforward and easy, just like with the MSS.

I am interested in one of these to replace my MSS. What speed and size are the drives you have installed in the device? How much storage capacity resulted from those drives?

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Synology DS411: 2 * WD20EARX and 2 * WD20EARS
DIY Small Business Server 2011
MP 8-core 2.26GHz, 2012 MBA13 i7/8GB/256GB, AppleTVs, iPhone

I put in four Seagate 2TB enterprise drives, model ST32000644NS. Basically, I have the capacity of three drives since the space on one drive is reserved in case a drive fails...so I have about 6TB of space available.

Constellation ES
SATA 3.0Gb/s
2TB
7200 RPM
Cache 64MB

Thanks. So their SHR behaves like RAID 5 when the drives are all the same size, i.e.: (n-1)*size. Their documentation is a bit light on details for calculating SHR capacities.

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Synology DS411: 2 * WD20EARX and 2 * WD20EARS
DIY Small Business Server 2011
MP 8-core 2.26GHz, 2012 MBA13 i7/8GB/256GB, AppleTVs, iPhone

I think that is correct. I did have a choice as to whether I wanted one or two of the drives reserved for "fail-safe." I chose one.